A Reversal in the Global Decline of the Labor Share
Description
This is the data set used in the paper "A Reversal in the Global Decline of the Labor Share?" by Selen Andic and Michael C. Burda (2021), forthcoming article in the Economics Letters. The data set includes 124 countries and spans the period 1980-2017. It is constructed using publicly available data from AMECO, IMF, OECD and PWT 9.1.
Files
Steps to reproduce
1. Total economy labor share, which is adjusted for self-employment, is a combined data set drawing on AMECO (ALCD0) and PWT 9.1 (labsh). Data are taken from the source providing the longest series for each country. Labor share data of Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Luxembourg, Portugal, Romania, Spain and Turkey are from AMECO, the rest is from PWT 9.1. 2. Nominal GDP data are from the IMF World Economic Outlook 2019 Database (NGDPD), expressed in billion USD. 3. The data necessary to compute gross and net corporate labor share are mainly from OECD 14A. Non financial accounts by sectors, S11 Non financial corporations. Compensation (NFD1P), taxes (NFD2P), gross operating surplus (GOS) (NFB2G_B3GP) and GVA (NFR211) are all converted to million USD using the exchange rate (XNE) series from AMECO. 4. To calculate depreciation, drawing on AMECO, we first obtain ratio of the difference between GOS (with code UOGD) and net operating surplus (NOS with code UOND) to GOS for the total economy. Assuming that this ratio also holds at the sectoral level, we multiply the GOS in non-financial corporate sector (from the OECD with code NFB2G_B3GP) with the mentioned depreciation over GOS ratio to get the depreciation in non-financial corporate sector. 5. Employment, real capital stock, real output and capital stock prices are from PWT 9.1 with the codes emp, rnna, rgdpna and pl_n. See PWT 9.1 and Feenstra et. al (2015) for further details of these data. 6. Finally, we share the Stata16 .do file for the readers who want to replicate the figures and tables in Andic, S and M. C. Burda (2021). A Reversal in the Global Decline of the Labor Share?, forthcoming article in Economics Letters. Please use “code_Andic&Burda(2021)_article” together with the Excel file named “Data_A Reversal in the Global Decline of the Labor Share” to replicate the article.